Whites with metastatic breast cancer have less pain and have it later compared to nonwhites, U.S. researchers found.

Liana Castel of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues studied 1,124 women with metastatic breast cancer and bone metastases in 19 countries who received standard treatment in an international chemotherapy clinical trial conducted from October 1998 to January 2001. Eighty-two percent of the non-white women were from the United States.

The Brief Pain Inventory, which is based on a scale of zero to 10 in pain severity -- was administered repeatedly over a year to determine pain levels.

The study, published in the Jan. 1 issue of Cancer, found that non-white women reached a pain level of seven or higher -- severe pain -- on the Brief Pain Inventory scale significantly earlier during a year of follow-up, compared to the white women. Besides race, other predictors for greater pain were inactive performance status and preceding radiation treatment.  // Copyright 2007 by United Press International



Publication date: 26 November 2007   

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